Saturday, May 31, 2014

According to Discogs, who offer a copy of the record for CA$63.95, here, this is the third and final release by the 7" label, with the first two being Jonathan Monk's My Mother Cleaning My Father's Piano and Douglas Gordon's Bootlegged. All three artists are close friends and have previously collaborated on the 12" record For Those About To Rock (2000), along with Ross Sinclair, who provides text for The Mirrored Catalogue D'Oiseaux.

The recording documents an installation in 2002 in which the artist subjected mocking birds to the sound of French Composer Olivier Messiaen's Catalogue D'Oiseaux, an experimental composition for piano, based on bird songs. Towards the end of the exhibition the mocking birds begin mimicking the sound of the piano melodies. Nature reflecting art reflecting nature.

Released late February, this exhibition catalogue accompanied a year long presentation that ended in March of this year. The book is edited by Line Ulekleiv and features a foreword by Jan Andresen, Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with other texts by Pernille Albrethsen, John Kelsey, and Patrick Frey. It documents Rock on Top of Another Rock, the first public sculpture by Fischli & Weiss to be presented in the UK. The monumental work, installed in Hyde Park, near the Serpentine Gallery, the work was undertaken in tandem with the pairs’s rock project in Valdresflya, Norway.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

A George Maciunas designed label on Canal Street compartmentalized box containing “peculiar light bulbs, chemical light, optics, etc.” As with most Fluxus editions, the contents varied.

Maciunas described this work in a letter to collector Hans Sohm in 1972 as “very nice item, but not cheap” and gave the price as $60.00. A year later it was listed in Fluxus newsletters as $100. The work is available from Hundertmark Gallery, here, for 4800 Euro.

Monday, May 26, 2014

Subtitled A Short History of Desktop Publishing, this title documents the separation of four colour printing into a history lesson of desktop publishing. The magenta for each image is first printed on a stencil duplicator (or mimeograph) from 1880, and then feeds into a Spirit Duplicator from 1923, which adds the cyan. The black is printed by a laser printer from 1969 and the yellow is then added from an inkjet printer from 1976.

The copy below (which lists itself as being from a 'second run' of 30 copies, but also is numbered 34) belongs to printer/publisher/artist/Art Metropole board member JP King. I visited his studio yesterday, alongside two students from ESA who are themselves prolific makers of 'zines and had expressed interest in his Risograph machine (see bottom picture). King calls the book his "prized possession". Visit King's Paper Pusher site, here.

Sunday, May 25, 2014

Packaged in a retro detergent box (circa 1973) this hefty volume documents a two-part exhibition at San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute that began in February of 2008. Curator Jens Hoffmann invited the artist to curate an exhibition of his own work, accompanied by works by other artists that he considered significant to his early-period career.

The catalogue showcases a vast range of works that have influenced McCarthy’s practice, with reproductions of artists' ephemera, personal letters, musical scores, reprinted essays and reviews from periodicals such as Artforum, Avalanche, High Performance, Vision and Parkett, and excerpts from artists' monographs spanning from the 1960s to the near-present.

Dedicated to Artists’ books, multiples, recordings, postcards, magazines and ephemera, this site will feature reviews of recent titles, features on artists and publishers, random listings of older works, the occasional longer essay or interview, straight-forward pictorials,links to recent news, etc. etc., in an attempt to create an aggregate of information on editioned artworks.

About Me

Dave Dyment is an artist, writer and curator based in Toronto, Canada. He is the co-editor of "One for Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions" (YYZ Books, 2012). His own work can be viewed at www.dave-dyment.com. He is represented by MKG127.